ALittleLight
Altman and friends are mainly actually making and delivering AI. If they also hype their timelines/valuations, they also seem to make directional progress on the goals.
"Okay, all humans dead, technically a 100% cure."
If you optimized for minimizing deathbed regret perhaps you'd regret that on your deathbed!
If I have cogent thoughts on my deathbed I expect they'll be along the lines of "I wish I wasn't dying" and not regretting the many ways I enjoyed my time on Earth (which includes vibe coding apps nobody uses).
This isn't optimistic in my opinion. It's not even fully realistic because Gemma 4, which you can run on local hardware, is even better and another few orders of magnitude cheaper. A 20k job today might a few dollars in a few years.
In other words, a significantly better model is also 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper. You can cut it in half by doing batch. You could cut it another order of magnitude by running something like Gemma 4 on cloud hardware, or even more on local hardware.
If this trend continues another 3 years, what costs 20k today might cost $100.
If you think that means your company isn't going to be involved in lethal autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance... I don't really know what to tell you. I doubt you really believe that. Obviously you will be involved in that and you are effectively working on those projects now.
Concluding something farcical and then asking people to debate it is silly and a waste of time. 400k is an extremely high household income. Childcare is a common expense for families with children. The claim that only extremely high income people can afford a common expense is wrong on its face and needs no further analysis.
You can also rack up huge medical debt and then not pay it. The hospital will sell your debt to bill collectors who will call you for a while, and eventually sue you. At that point you can offer to settle for pennies on the dollar, or you might lose the lawsuit and have to declare bankruptcy which would mean you have negative credit for a few years.
Obviously it will be a difficult time, and hopefully you have something else, but they won't just let you die because you can't afford it.
However, not all blind people are good with screen readers. For them, an AI assistant would be useful. Even for good screen reader users an AI could be useful.
An example: Yesterday, I needed to buy new valve caps for my car's tires. The screen reader path would be something like walmart -> jump to search field, type "valve cap car tire" and submit -> jump to results section -> iterate through a few results to make sure I'm getting the right thing at a good price -> go to the result I want -> checkout flow. Alternatively, the AI flow would be telling my AI assistant that I need new car tire valve caps. The assistant could then simultaneously search many provider options, select one based on criteria it inferred, and order it by itself.
The AI path, in other words, gets a better result (looking through more providers means it's likelier to find a better path, faster delivery, whatever) and also, much easier and faster. Of course, not only for screen reader users, but also just everyone.
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
"Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians"
I've had the misfortune of dealing with a radiologist or two this year. They spent 10-20 minutes talking about the imaging and the results with me. What they said was very superficial and they didn't have answers to several of the questions I asked.
I went over the images and pathology reports with ChatGPT and it was much better informed, did have answers for my questions, and had additional questions I should have been asking. I've used ChatGPT's information on the rare occasions when doctors deign to speak with me and it's always been right. Me, repeating conclusions and observations ChatGPT made, to my doctors, has twice changed the course of my treatment this year, and the doctors have never said anything I've learned from ChatGPT is wrong. By contrast, my doctors are often wrong, forgetful, or mistaken. I trust ChatGPT way more than them.
Good image recognition models probably are much better than human radiologists already and certainly could be vastly better. One obstacle this post mentions - AI models "struggle to replicate this performance in hospital conditions", is purely a choice. If HMOs trained models on real data then this would no longer be the case, if it is now, which I doubt.
I think it's pretty clearly doctors, and their various bureaucratic and legal allies, defending their legal monopoly so they can provide worse and slower healthcare at higher prices, so they continue to make money, at the small cost of the sick getting worse and dying.
Second, you can walk or drive on a street. Every passerby in a car could kill you if they wanted to by colliding with you. It rarely happens. Stand next to a tall ledge or overpass with crowds walking by and watch the teeming masses - you're unlikely to see any of the thousands of people walking by leap off to their end. Similarly, in life, even though basically anyone could kill you, it's very rare to encounter someone who is in the process of ending their own life, and killing you would basically end, or severely degrade, their own life. Almost nobody wants to do it.
Charlie Kirk is/was kind of an extreme example. He said many things that severely angered hostile people. He went into big crowds and said provocative things many times before being shot. I think in most situations you have to push pretty hard to get to the point where people are angry enough to shoot at you. If you can avoid dangerous neighborhoods and dangerous professions (drugs and gangs) and dangerous people (especially boyfriends/husbands) then you are pretty unlikely to be shot and you benefit from being able to carry guns or keep guns in your home to protect yourself and your family.
For one example, consider the "Grooming gangs" in the UK, where thousands of men raped thousands of girls for decades with the tacit knowledge/permission of authorities - and despite the pleas of the girls and parents for help. Such a thing could be handled quite differently in a society that was well armed. If the police wouldn't help you, you might settle the matter yourself.